Ahead Of iPhone, Verizon Says It May Start Throttling Top 5%
Of Data Users

The same day Verizon Wireless started taking pre-orders for iPhone, they posted a new notice on their site saying they reserve the right to throttle the top 5% of data users,WSJ reports. Here’s what it said:

Important Information about Verizon

As part of our continuing efforts to provide the best experience to our more than 94 million customers, Verizon Wireless is introducing two new network management practices.

We are implementing optimization and transcoding technologies in our network to transmit data files in a more efficient manner to allow available network capacity to benefit the greatest number of users. These techniques include caching less data, using less capacity, and sizing the video more appropriately for the device. The optimization process is agnostic to the content itself and to the website that provides it. While we invest much effort to avoid changing text, image, and video files in the compression process and while any change to the file is likely to be indiscernible, the optimization process may minimally impact the appearance of the file as displayed on your device. For a further, more detailed explanation of these techniques, please visit http://www.verizonwireless.com/vzwoptimization

If you subscribe to a Data Plan or Feature on February 3, 2011 or after, the following applies:

Verizon Wireless strives to provide customers the best experience when using our network, a shared resource among tens of millions of customers. To help achieve this, if you use an extraordinary amount of data and fall within the top 5% of Verizon Wireless data users we may reduce your data throughput speeds periodically for the remainder of your then current and immediately following billing cycles to ensure high quality network performance for other users at locations and times of peak demand. Our proactive management of the Verizon Wireless network is designed to ensure that the remaining 95% of data customers aren’t negatively affected by the inordinate data consumption of just a few users.

A spokesperson tried to pass it off like a coincidence. “This is clearly something we’ve been looking at for some time and introducing now,” he told WSJ. “There’s nothing magic about the timing.” Yeahhhhh, sure.